Potatoes are about the easiest thing there is to grow. I plant them around St. Patrick's Day, pay a little bit of attention to them during the spring (mounding up dirt around the hills, watering occasionally), and then summer arrives with a harvest of buried treasure. I dug the first hill this morning at 7:00 am, and we ate the spuds exactly twelve hours later. The flavor was absolutely sublime, enhanced only by a little butter, some cream, fresh chives, and salt and pepper. I could have eaten a whole plateful, but I had also prepared some pan-sauteed catfish and a beet and endive salad which, frankly, was disappointing. Something about it just didn't hang together. Maybe it was the rather bland goat cheese, which had none of the tang that the beets needed. Oh well, I'll try again. I think that beets and potatoes are the only things that will be coming out of the garden for the next week. But there are a lot of things on the horizon......provided that they stay alive. My volunteer cucumber vine succumbed over the weekend to the wilt that always seems to get them. Last week I planted some replacements that have come up nicely, so we will see if it is really a timing issue. Sometimes it is possible to plant things at a time that allows them to miss the insect that spreads plant viruses, and I have read that such a strategy can work with cucumbers. I choose to be optimistic. Meanwhile, my eggplant have been attacked by waves of flea beetles, and I actually have given in and started spraying them with a relatively benign, chrysanthemum-derived insecticide. I am trying to be sparing, because the spray is also toxic for beneficial insects, especially bees, which we have in abundance in the community garden. (We now have a beehive, one of several that have been deployed in community gardens in DC.) I just decided that I was unwilling to give up any hope of having eggplant, even if it meant having to make (very mild) organic compromises. And even with the spray, the leaves on the plants have plenty of little pin holes. So the pests are getting their fair share.
4 comments:
Speaking of pests, I was thinking about plagues of locusts. In "The Good Earth," for instance (I never read the novel so I'm talking about the movie), it's a tragedy when the locusts eat all the crops: there's nothing left for people to eat. But wait: why don't people eat the locusts? Wikipedia says they're edible. In fact, they must be very nutritious, being so well fed on lovingly cultivated crops. Bringing this back to you and organic gardening.... Maybe you could eat the bugs?
Interesting idea...though these flea beetles are really really really tiny; about 10 would equal a grain of rice. They seem to eat many times their body weight/size. I'm not really sure how that is possible. But I suppose I could have used them like sesame seeds on a bagel...
Joel, my comment is, unfortunately, largely unrelated to your "New Potatoes" entry... Have you looked into what food crops are indigenous to this area? I don't know if that would mean insects would be more or less of a problem, but maybe it would be of interest. You've probably already looked into what's indigenous to the DC area, so this comment might be completely useless... Sorry... I just remember growing up in Arizona, my dad, who was a botanist in a former life, would always promote the incorporation of plants like yucca and prickly pear into cuisine as indigenous plants were easier to cultivate. Okay, I'm starting to ramble. The potatoes look delicious, though! :-)
- Aaron Wilder
Aaron -
That is an excellent observation, and it is definitely one to apply in landscaping choices, both to ensure that the plants do well and to provide food for the native animals and insects.
But for food, I like to grow what I like to eat. And in fact we would not grow potatoes if we were purists, since they come from Peru. Humans have been spreading food crops around for a long while.
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